IT WAS TWO o’clock the next morning. A brilliant moon over-romanticized the huge and shaggy hills. In the courtyard before Headquarters the wagons were being loaded hastily. There was a feeling of excitement in the air. It was shared, to the common danger, by the mules, and the curses of the drivers, vitriolic but subdued, rose like the hissing of a pit of snakes. I edged my way cautiously between malicious teeth and hooves to find my kit and fill my water-bottle. I had a little fever that morning, and life seemed more than usually fantastic.
Inside the farm everyone was scrambling methodically for their things by the inadequate light of a candle. When we came out the courtyard was clearing. My white pony was waiting for me by the gate, a patient little ghost. I strapped my belongings on to her back and mounted. We had ten miles to go before dawn.
We moved off at 2.30. At the head of the column the banner of the Rising Sun went forward, flickering like a spectre. The track showed grey before us. The feet of men and ponies made little sound in the thick dust. The small, plodding infantrymen still wore their coolie hats, and the steel helmets slung across their backs were humps below their shoulders. These things, and the silence of their march, made them grotesque and eerie; I felt that I was riding with a goblin army.
An order came down the column, and bolts rattled as the men loaded their rifles. With a certain surprise (for I was leading the kind of life that suits me, and it had lulled me into a peaceful and unreflecting state of mind) I reminded myself that presently, if all went well, we should be doing our best to kill a lot of other people, and they would be doing their best to kill us. The prospect of whistling bullets was mildly exciting; but only mildly, for the chances of their whistling in anything uncomfortably like the right direction I took to be remote. A posse of opium-addicts armed with rusty Mausers did not, however lavishly they might be decorated with paper charms conferring invulnerability, constitute a very redoubtable foe. Besides, I strongly suspected that they would scratch the fixture altogether.
In campaigning of this sort intelligence is more than half the battle, for without intelligence no battle can take place; and I did not doubt that in this respect the bandits were better served than we were. In every village of the district they harried they were reputed to have the wealth of the principal families so exactly assessed that they knew, not only which people to capture, but how much to demand for their ransom. (Except when dealing with foreigners, the Manchurian bandit is too good a business man to be impossibly exorbitant.)
It was in short virtually certain that we had been brushing all the time against an unseen web of spies; and news travels fast in the East, in fact as well as in sensational fiction. That man on the sky-line last night had been only one – the most spectacular – of a thousand potential sources of warning to the bandits. I looked at the intricate moonlit pattern of the mountains and reflected drowsily that for a small force escape should be an easy matter, however well we blocked the passes in their rear. I resigned myself to disillusionment and presently fell asleep in the saddle.
Two hours later the sky was paling and the stars were almost gone. Now you could see the bats as they flew. In a little it would be dawn. The head of the column debouched suddenly from the wide, irregular gorge down which we had been marching, and our objective was in sight: a big jagged mountain, which thrust forward shoulders to enclose a valley. The bandits’ place was in the valley, which was perhaps a mile away, and of which little could as yet be seen. Our other two contingents were presumably in position on the other side of the mountain. The battle-field was before us.
So far 1 had ridden in an agreeable torpor, shot with momentary flashes of anticipation and conjecture. Now things began to happen.
They were the wrong things, but they happened in such a baffling and enigmatic way that it took us some time to realize this. First of all, from the inside of the valley, which was half hidden from us by a spur, there rolled up with great deliberation a thick cloud of pallid smoke; someone had fired a house, or houses. (But who? And why? We had neither the time nor the data to answer these questions.) Then more smoke was seen, coming this time from a little corrie in the hill just above us, quite close; it rose slowly in the still air, a slim and deprecating column. (How long had that signal fire been burning? Had it evoked the other, or the other it?) The officers, sitting squatly on their ponies, looked with disapproval at these portents.
The Major issued an order. Kaku and two other mounted men went clattering up an old path and disappeared into the corrie above, from which the smoke continued to ascend in a bland, a rather self-conscious way. The column was halted, but very few of the tired men lay down. It was just beginning to get light.
In five minutes the horsemen reappeared, bringing with them one prisoner. He was a tall, facetious-looking youth, who seemed in no doubt of his ability to pass the situation off with a laugh. But Kaku went at him like a terrier, threatening fearful things in a series of staccato yaps, while the officers stood round, majestic but uninitiated, eagerly absorbing what few scraps of Japanese the little boy flung them over his shoulder. Meanwhile the smoke-cloud above the bandits’ valley thickened and slowly spread in sumptuous, bulging convolutions.
The prisoner’s facetiousness drained slowly from him. At last he gave way altogether: indicated which of the three paths before us led to our objective: and was ordered to guide us down it. The horsemen scrambled into their saddles. The bandits’ ally, grinning in a sickly way, was given the colours to carry and a stirrup-leather to hold on to. An advance guard on ponies, half a dozen strong, set off down the winding path. M. and I went with them, expecting to be called back at any moment. The infantrymen followed as fast as they could.
That scrambling charge, though unprofitable, was exhilarating. It was the hour of dawn – that instant in the day’s long life when everything seems still and poised and has a quality of surprise, like unexpectedly good scenery disclosed by the rise of the curtain. We rode circuitously between a succession of little bluffs which rose like tree-crowned islands from the valley’s floor; and all the time we dipped in and out of dead ground, so that our goal was not continuously in sight. The chance of an ambush, though it seemed to me remote, lent to the landscape, already picturesque, an added interest; no geologist could have eyed the crags, no botanist the tangled scrub, more keenly or judiciously than we did. Or more in vain.
For nothing happened. We trotted forward, important and intrepid; and were ignored. Only, as we drew near it, the original column of smoke was joined by others. Clouds less well established but as dense began to plume the whole area in which our imaginations were busy reconstructing the bandits’ stronghold. A petulant and unaccountable incendiarism was clearly the order of the day.
We came to a place where the path forked and halted for a moment. On the very noticeable silence thus created there fell, with an air of premeditation, the hollow sound of an explosion, some way distant. This increased our perplexity; nobody could guess what it meant. Later we learnt that it was a random shot – such a shot as one fires into reeds to see if they hold duck – from the mountain gun of the Manchukuo contingent. That, I am ashamed to say, is the nearest I have ever come to hearing a shot fired in anger.
The sound, though inexplicable, was exciting. Everyone put their ponies into a gallop. We went clattering down the path, past a clump of trees, round the corner of a deserted hut, and slap into the bandits’ stronghold. Stronghold, indeed! It looked like the early stages of a heath fire in what house-agents call the Surrey Highlands.
From the never very desirable sites of half a dozen huts flames leapt noisily into the air. A mean hamlet was going up in smoke before our eyes. Three or four houses had not been fired: an omission which we lost no time in making good. This seemed to me more like co-operation than revenge, but there was nothing else that we could do, even by way of a gesture. The bandits’ village stood in a clearing at the foot of a slope; behind it the face of the mountain rose steeply, clothed with a forest of almost subtropical density and to all appearances trackless. The last of the bandits could not have left the clearing more than ten minutes ago, but they were as far beyond the reach of pursuit as if they had had an hour’s start. It was hopeless country.
Of their captives there was no sign. For some reason nobody seemed to bother their heads very much about the fate of those sixteen unfortunate people. Alas for the theorists, who pretend that in these internationally minded days all members of the human race are fast becoming as equal in each other’s own eyes as in the eyes of God … I could not help reflecting that if those sixteen Chinese had been one English spinster I might have had a different tale to tell of our abortive expedition.
The fires burned briskly in an empty valley. We left them crackling irresponsibly and rode sadly back to meet the main body, feeling that we had been scored off. (Though how exactly that wanton destruction of their own property could be interpreted as one up to the bandits, I am to this day far from clear.) Still, we felt that we had been sold, where we had prepared to sell our lives. The steam rising from our ponies stank of anti-climax.
Where would we be without the pleasures of anticipation? Life is like (among other things) a child’s money-box. The process of hoarding, whether it be hopes or pennies, affords a delight which, though mild, is continuous and never turns sour. When at last we spend what we have saved up, we purchase almost always disappointment. ‘This isn’t at all what I wanted,’ we grumble; ‘this isn’t up to expectation.’ And in our chagrin (against which experience should have taught us to forearm ourselves) we forgot what pleasure expectation gave us before it was cheated.
In this matter I am at once a defeatist and an opportunist. I allow myself to entertain high hopes, not because I expect them for a moment to be realized, but because I enjoy entertaining them. I am a connoisseur, a rather unscrupulous connoisseur, of the delights of anticipation. I promise myself great things purely for the fun of making the promises. In this way I had got the maximum enjoyment from this expedition which had just ended in fiasco. No optimist could have more keenly or more consciously relished its excitements in advance; no sceptic could have accepted their non-fulfilment with more impregnable equanimity. This capacity for making the best of both worlds – the present and the future – I attribute to my Scottish blood.
Even now, in this moment of deflation, anticipation was at hand to buoy us up again. There is always something to look forward to. In this case it was breakfast. We had been on the move for some hours, and as we sprawled beside a pleasant little stream the prospect of putting something in our empty bellies made failure seem, for the moment, much less bitter. Soon we were eating cold rice and pickles and making, with a judicious air, chimerical surmises about the bandits’ flight. The hills looked very lovely. A cuckoo called from a copse of oak. Huge clouds of smoke drifted and hung and rose to catch the early sunlight above a valley which was still a bowl of shadows. There was a smell of burning thatch in the air.
On a spur above us three signallers were heliographing to one of the other contingents on a ridge across the valley. How very up to date we were, I reflected: so modern, so mobile, so well disciplined. We ought to be a match for any bandits. …
‘Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!’ called that aggravating bird, in what seemed to me a very pointed manner.